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When elephants fight

At COP15, carbon is power: the more you have, the more you matter, which is why all eyes are on China and the United States as the talking gets down to the wire. The world's two biggest emitters have been trading harsh words for ten days and, as some 114 heads of state or government pile into Copenhagen, the US China tone is getting no better.

Senator John Kerry’s speech here this morning covered all the sore points: yes, the US had failed so far, he admitted, but it was back in the game and things would be different. He pointed to President Obama’s green agenda and seemed confident that Congress would come good, if only under the threat that the EPA would regulate if the politicians didn’t legislate.

But, he said, all thatwas contingent on what happened in Copenhagen and it was more than an inconvenient truth that by 2020 China’s emissions would be 40 per cent larger than those of the US. All major emitters, he said, had to take on binding targets and every country that was part of the problem now or in the future had to be transparent and accountable.

Shared responsibility, Senator Kerry argued, entails an obligation to each country to share information about its good faith commitments. Trust and transparency were key and verification was neither new nor threatening, being more than exists in nuclear or in trade agreements. Without an agreement that addresses this core of transparency, Senator Kerry stressed, it will be difficult to proceed. And for good measure, in less than diplomatic language, he said nobody who failed to sign up could expect to “dump high carbon goods” in the US markets. In other words, China,comply or face tariffs on your goods.

This is language that China is likely to resent. The Chinese side has flatly turned down international verification and shows no sign of shifting. Some Chinese commentators believe that the notorious unreliability of Chinese statistics lie behind the refusal; others say they believe a verification regime will open the door for its arch rival the US to interfere with Chinese energy policy and other fundamentals of the Chinese economy. China has further said that it will not accept international verification for anything that is not being paid for with international finance, and that it does not want short term finance in any event.

The fact is there is little trust and less good faith in this issue and to the Chinese side, ever suspicious that the US is determined to prevent China’s rise, it looks like a Trojan horse.China and the US have much to gain from cooperation, but if they do not get over this impasse, they put the global deal in jeopardy.

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评论 comments

卡托：并没有太大意义

Cato: certainly not ephochal

You might think from the media coverage that the Copenhagen summit on climate change is epochal. Wrong. Copenhagen hardly matters. If it doesn't produce an agreement, it clearly won't matter. But even if it yields an agreement, that will matter very little.

Why? Because reducing carbon emissions by 80% from the 1990 levels — the target for 2050 for rich countries — depends on technological breakthroughs, not political pledges at Copenhagen. Without technological breakthroughs, reducing carbon emissions by 80% will erode living standards in the countries concerned. No government will deliberately engineer economic distress for the sake of climate change, no matter what it signs at Copenhagen. Through history, treaties have been junked if they become politically inconvenient
In 1947, India signed treaties guaranteeing 500-odd princes privy purses and tax exemption in perpetuity, in return for their accession to India. Yet, when Indira Gandhi felt it politically convenient, she abolished the privy purses and tax privileges. International law allows sovereign governments to scrap any prior treaty.

In the Kyoto treaty on climate change, 37 rich countries pledged to reduce their carbon emissions to 5% below their 1990 level. But most actually increased their emissions. These very treaty-breakers now propose another treaty!

The US signed an anti-ballistic missile treaty with the USSR during the Cold War. But subsequently the US scrapped the treaty, with impunity. The Maastricht Treaty, setting up the European Union, mandated a fiscal deficit ceiling of 3% of GDP for member states. But several members, including Germany and France, have been running deficits far higher than this, with impunity. When political and economic conditions change, treaties hardly matter.
Now, research may yield technological breakthroughs — or steady, major improvements — that curb carbon emissions at modest cost, or even with a saving of costs. Aerosol cans once used CFCs. When these were phased out by the Montreal protocol, companies found it was actually cheaper to use natural gas in place of CFCs.

Meanwhile, thousands of innovations by individual companies reduced the energy-intensity of every conceivable appliance and practice. This halved the energy-intensity of GDP in the US and reduced its oil imports, breaking the power of OPEC in 1986. This was a typical technological surprise, not the result of governmental planning.
Something similar may happen in the case of carbon emissions. Government subsidies, carbon taxes, cap-and-trade systems, and research projects will aim to create conditions that encourage more research. These will surely yield new technologies and improvements. But these may or may not reduce emissions by 80%. With luck, a breakthrough may come in five years. Without luck, no breakthrough at all may occur. We simply do not know. That is why target dates set by governments are meaningless.

cato: certainly not ephocal 2

If new technologies cannot reduce emissions by 80% save at a huge cost that causes economic distress, governments will abandon emission targets. They will not deliberately create deep recessions just to curb emissions.

Will this lead to climate disaster? Maybe and maybe not. Scientific knowledge of the weather is very limited, and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projections are just intelligent guesstimates. IPCC scientists may be the best in the world, yet they cannot predict the weather more than five days ahead.
Can they predict the next drought in India? No. The next El Niño? No. The number of hurricanes in the Caribbean next year? No. So, can they accurately predict the weather 100 years hence? Surely not. When we know very little about a problem, we tend to worry endlessly about worst-case scenarios. That does not make the worst case certain, or even probable.

Despite climate uncertainties, it makes sense to mitigate emissions as insurance against a disaster that may never happen. Treaties are often signed to provide mutual insurance against political and economic risks. But if the insurance premium becomes costly enough to threaten economic distress, governments will abandon the treaties (à la Maastricht). No government will create a recession today to avoid a future disaster that may not happen anyway.

The lesson for Indian strategy at Copenhagen is clear. India should talk tough and not worry about being called a deal-breaker. When a deal's value is so uncertain, it matters little whether it's broken or not. India should keep its commitments light, and be ready to jump ship if others do. Never assume that others will actually implement climate pledges.